The Greatest Novels

Thanks in part to movies based on it, The Hunchback of Notre-Dame calls up images of Gothic horror in the public imagination. The novel is associated with other dark nineteenth-century classics like Frankenstein.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

I'm somewhat stumped by Wuthering Heights. It's solidly ensconced in the literary canon and inflicted on classes of students. And plenty of people—readers and writers alike—seem to love it. But three readings.... Critique • Quotes • Text • At the movies • Buy

Everyone knows the general story of The Scarlet Letter as referenced in the title. A young, married woman in an early American colony, Hester Prynne, becomes pregnant from an affair with a man she refuses to name, and.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

You could make a case for every Charles Dickens novel being atypical in some way, but Little Dorrit really is a special case. It's been called his most political novel—the book George Bernard Shaw said converted him.... Critique • Quotes • Text • Buy

George Eliot's first great popular novel gives only hints of the depths to be plumbed in the future, yet it has become an enduring favourite for its own virtues. In many ways, The Mill on the Floss is a silly romantic.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

What's incredible about Middlemarch, George Eliot's masterwork, is how engrossing it is. I mean, this is a novel that deals with issues of art, education reform, scholarly research, medical science and provincial British politics.... Critique • Quotes • Text • Buy

In our world the escapades of young Tom Sawyer are recounted in the shadow cast by his more famous friend, Huckleberry Finn. Yet, during author Mark Twain's life, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer was his most.... Critique • Quotes • Text • Buy

It's easy to overlook Mark Twain's bite in The Prince and the Pauper. The social criticism is not as sharp as in some of his later novels, like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn or A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

No one needs to be told what Treasure Island is about. Robert Louis Stevenson's novel has defined the pirate story, not to mention the treasure-hunting story, the mutiny-on-the-seas story—and.... Critique • Quotes • Text • At the movies • Buy

In the article on John Buchan, I called his novels seminal thrillers surpassed by the later best-selling works of intrigue for which they showed the way. Stevenson's Kidnapped takes us back yet another generation.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

If your first exposure to Mark Twain's time travel tale was the Disney or other screen adaptations, you may be shocked by your reading of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. Shocked by how rough.... Critique • Quotes • Text • At the movies • Buy

Everyone knows the central conceit of The Picture of Dorian Gray: a beautiful young man remains unblemished by age, while his painted portrait, hidden from public sight, grows older and corrupted by moral degradation.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

It's instructive how much of our literature has to do with warfare. From ancient works like the Iliad, through the epics of medieval slaughter and Shakespeare's historical dramas, to modern novels—bloody conflict has.... Critique • Quotes • Text • At the movies • Buy

The first part of Dracula, when Britisher Jonathan Harker travels to Transylvania to inform his firm's mysterious client about its purchase of real estate in London on his behalf, has got to be some of the most entrancing.... Critique • Quotes • Text • At the movies • Buy

If Rudyard Kipling were to publish his most acclaimed novel today, he would likely face more than the usual charges of colonialism and imperialism that have been levelled at him through much of the twentieth century.... Critique • Quotes • Text • Buy

If we have to pick one aspect that might make Buddenbrooks the first important novel of the twentieth century, it could be its moral ambiguity. The story of the Buddenbrook family is told over four generations.... Critique • Quotes • Translations • Buy

It is difficult to separate The Forsyte Saga from the justly acclaimed films and television series based on it. The adaptations have enchanted everyone who followed them, most of whom have likely never read the books. But.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

After the terrorist attacks of 9/11, Joseph Conrad's novel of a century earlier was apparently widely read again, especially in Western intelligence circles. I'm not sure, though, what those new readers.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

If you come to G.K. Chesterton's avowed masterpiece expecting a piece of early twentieth-century realism, you're going to be very surprised. If you've heard it's a mystery—hopefully along the lines of the.... Critique • Quotes • Text • Buy

There is not a lot to say about the narrative structure or the characters or the writing in this famous novel. The Thirty-Nine Steps is a seminal tale of intrigue, a classic early story of an innocent man drawn into dark.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

I really wanted to love this book. It's one of the sharpest indictments of war ever written in fictional form, a groundbreaking work by a sincere, progressive author. But I found I cannot love it as a whole. I can only like it.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

I love the way this novel starts. If you're doing a biographical story, why not start at the very beginning with the perceptions of an infant? Well, baby tuckoo grows up quickly in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and becomes.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

Life in smalltown America has long been celebrated or satirized in fiction, but seldom as comprehensively or as pointedly as in Sinclair Lewis's first great novel, some would argue his greatest work. The impact of Main Street.... Critique • Quotes • Text • Buy

A century after its first publication, the story of George Babbitt can elicit reactions of both "This is so dated!" and "Just like today!" And often from the same readers. Sinclair Lewis's most influential novel, Babbitt, deftly satirizes.... Critique • Quotes • Text • Buy

Partway though a rereading of Mrs Dalloway a sudden idea threatened to upset everything I had ever thought about the author. Was it possible Virginia Woolf was really making fun of her insufferably effete lead characters.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

Unbelievably, few people read The Great Gatsby when it was first published. In the roaring Twenties, its questioning of the American Dream may not have been welcome. Other American writers, like Sinclair Lewis.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

It's an irony that the first successful novel by the writer often accused of being mindlessly ballsy features a hero without a penis. Jake Barnes had it shot off in the war, a tragedy that prevents him and the woman who.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

Death Comes for the Archbishop is often considered Willa Cather's masterpiece and is on several lists as one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century—which may be surprising if you read it alongside other.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

When they got around to making the movie of Elmer Gantry—more than three decades after the novel came out—they still felt compelled to preface it with a warning: We believe that certain aspects of Revivalism can bear.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

It's the ultimate novel of ideas. A book of characters who spend most of their time spouting thoughts on big topics like love, religion, science, politics and sex. That is, when they're not engaging in the latter. In the.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

All Quiet on the Western Front is the kind of book you've heard about forever as a Great Book, one you've always meant to read some day, and yet it sounds so heavy and depressing and so...so worthwhile...that.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

A Farewell to Arms has been called the best American novel to come out of World War I. That could be accurate. I can think of few other American novels that are even contenders, though I can also think of.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

Everyone who loves classic film noir knows the complicated storyline from the 1941 flick starring Humphrey Bogart. The Maltese Falcon involves intrigue among shady, eccentric characters to find a black bird made of gold.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

Pearl S. Buck has sometimes been accused of stereotyping the Chinese peasants as noble, simple creatures. But this was hardly the reaction to The Good Earth in the early 1930s when it became a sensation in the West and.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

I wonder if people who refer to Aldous Huxley's Brave New World as a cautionary tale—that is, those who aren't confusing it with George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four—could actually spell out what it is cautioning against.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

Some writers are not really good novelists—don't seem to have the artistic talents to shape words, sentences and paragraphs into conventional novelistic form—and yet can recognize a great story and marshal the.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

A tip for reading Tender Is the Night. Don't try it right after The Great Gatsby, even though it was Scott Fitzgerald's next novel. If you do, you'll be disappointed. The tight writing of Gatsby—with its unforgettable.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

If you've read or heard about Dashiell Hammett's hardboiled detective fiction, you may not be prepared for what you'll find in The Thin Man. Sure, there's a somewhat jaded private eye, one Nick Charles, as well as a..... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

Appointment in Samarra is about as perfectly structured and written a novel of American social critique as you could find in the first half of the twentieth century—up there with Babbitt and The Great Gatsby. True.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

British mystery authors like to place their imagined crimes in the hallowed halls of distinguished universities. Maybe they hope uncovering wickedness in the English and classics departments distinguishes their.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

Despite issues with objectionable titling over the years, And Then There were None has been not only the most popular novel by Agatha Christie during her long, prolific career, but one of the best-selling books of all time.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

"Science split the atom and Joyce split the word." This summary of progress in the first half of the twentieth century has often been stated in reference to Finnegans Wake. James Joyce chops up words and fuses syllables.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

My comments upon first reading Raymond Chandler's famous detective novel, The Big Sleep, were all about how sparse and direct his prose was. Just the facts. Plain, chiselled sentences à la Hemingway and Hammett.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

The Grapes of Wrath is John Steinbeck's most controversial work, seeming to advocate a socialist revolution to end the misery of the dispossessed folks during the dirty nineteen-thirties. It can only be this apparent political.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

The Day of the Locust was so underrated in 1939 when it came out and in the years immediately following author Nathanael West's death in 1940, that when critics eventually rediscovered the man's works they.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

Darkness at Noon was not quite what I had expected, based on what I had heard. Fans and critics had described it as presenting the ordeal of an innocent man charged during the Moscow show trials of the 1930s. Torture.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

For me this is the big Hemingway book—his greatest work and one of the most significant novels of the twentieth century. And it is a big book, his longest. But For Whom the Bell Tolls does not read as long. Partly.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

Why do we still read Brideshead Revisited? An account of aimless, upper-class, young men wasting their time at Oxford University in hedonism. Until the story is swallowed by the larger theme of an intensely Catholic.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

This was hailed by Time as the best novel about the Second World War. And for once, Time might have had it right. If we add the qualifier "American" between "best" and "novel". I was surprised in reading Norman.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

George Orwell's dystopian novel has had the fortune to be acclaimed in the West by two usually opposed groups—right wingers and left wingers. The former saw it as a denunciation of collectivism in all its forms.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

It takes Nevil Shute a long time in this novel to get to the town of Alice (Alice Springs actually), and even longer to get to the town like Alice. The building of a new town in Australia is only a minor part of A Town Like Alice.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

In the 1980s Isaac Asimov reread the Foundation stories he had written in the 1940s and had compiled as a trilogy of books in the 1950s, and he was appalled. The stories had no action, no suspense, no romance—they were.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

Few novels divide readers as The Catcher in the Rye does. This may sound like a bizarre thing to say, since J.D. Salinger's novel has been wildly popular since it came out in 1951. It's been lauded as changing the course of.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

Is it all timshel? Steinbeck has his main character drop the word at the end of the novel. Earlier it had been explained that the Hebrew word from the Bible meant that humankind may or may not triumph over evil, that we're.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

Anyone reading The Demolished Man for the first time today may enjoy it as a kind of typical science fiction thriller—a cat-and-mouse game between cop and criminal, set in the future. A Sleuth-style battle taking place.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

It may seem Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 is becoming less relevant these days, as hard-copy books are at risk of disappearing, pushed aside by digital communications. Without paper media, warnings about.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

Chandler's longest novel is also his most praised. Which makes me wonder whether it's the length the critics are praising. Or if maybe they think it must be deep since it's so long. Is The Long Goodbye long because.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

Lolita is the kind of book that grows thicker each time you read it. The first time you may race through the novel to take in the plot of the man who loves and loses a preadolescent girl, what he calls a "nymphet". More.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

The Stars My Destination has often been called one of science fiction's greatest works, sometimes the greatest. Yet, the first time I read it, I didn't get the fuss. The novel was supposed to feature an unforgettable.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

It's interesting and odd that On the Beach and On the Road came out the same year. Both are dated 1957, but how very different they are. Only the accident of their titles being sequential in an alphabetical list could make.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

On the Road is the easiest novel to find "great lines" in. Open to any page. Jack Kerouac's writing is at such a consistent intensity that important, poetic, rhythmic, quotable sentences typical of the book's overall tone.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

Stranger in a Strange Land may be an old favourite of many readers who were first exposed to it in their youth, but the time may have come to drop it from the list of great novels. It has certainly lost the cult status.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

Whenever he was told he's never written anything else as good as Catch-22, Joseph Heller was tempted to reply, "Who has?" A bit of hyperbole. There are plenty of modern novels as good as, or better than, Catch-22.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

Around the time of this novel, Philip K. Dick was being heralded as the next scifi writer to break into mainstream popularity after Kurt Vonnegut. The Man in the High Castle won the prestigious Hugo Award for science fiction.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

Dune's timing was perfect. Launched in the mid-sixties around the beginning of the modern environmental movement, Frank Herbert's ecology-conscious science fiction novel and its many sequels and adaptation.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

The story of the sorcerer's apprentice is retold many times in mythology and fantasy. It goes like this: a seemingly ordinary young lad discovers he has an odd paranormal ability, becomes a novice wizard or magician.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

Sometimes it seems the English-speaking world spent the entire twentieth century trying to shake off the repressions of the Victorian era. The rebellious 1960s, for example, may have prided themselves on rejecting.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

The Left Hand of Darkness is about a lot of things. But, unlike many science fiction writers, Ursula K. Le Guin doesn't lay it all out for you in comic-book-style exposition. Rather, like a serious mainstream author.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

It was one of the naughtier books—but not the naughtiest—in a long line of books that scandalized some and enticed many more in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Even if you never read Portnoy's Complaint then, you'd heard.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

Larry Niven's popular novel has dated in the five-plus decades it's been around—though you can still find plenty of hard science fiction fans who consider it a modern classic. Ringworld arose from a certain tradition in.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

It's difficult to say exactly what constitutes the essential Riverworld series. I started reading it when only the first two books of Philip José Farmer's projected trilogy existed: To Your Scattered Bodies Go and.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

Writers are commonly asked by editors to cut their introductory passages and start their narratives in the midst of the action—in media res for the learned among us. For John Updike's Rabbit Angstrom series I might have.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

Two kinds of people are apt to hate Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: advanced philosophy majors and advanced novel readers. As a novel, Zen is terrible. Virtually no narrative, cardboard characters, and generally.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

You may find online a video of John Irving discussing how both he and Stephen King have striven not to please, but to appall. Once you get over the shock of discovering literary icon Irving and horrormeister King are mutual.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

To get an idea of what the Hitchhiker's Trilogy is like, you have only to read the titles of the five novels that comprise it: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy; The Restaurant at the End of the Universe; Life, the Universe.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

The story behind the discovery of this novel has become such an inspiring and sad modern legend that I want to be able to say the novel itself is brilliant. Either that, or be able to call it a disaster—to spite misguided.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

The English title of José Saramago's most acclaimed novel, Baltasar and Blimunda, gives the impression it's a love story, about the love between the soldier who has lost a hand in battle and the girl who has been orphaned by.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

After his post-apocalyptic tales of psychological horror, after his scandalous work on human mangling and perverse sexuality, J.G. Ballard turned to producing his most conventional, biographical and realistic.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

If you're well-versed in science fiction—or speculative fiction as it's often called—and you approach The Handmaid's Tale as an example of that genre, you may be disappointed. The world of Margaret.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

Love in the Time of Cholera is a favourite novel for lovers who take from it something like "Love conquers all" or "Follow your heart". Yet, Gabriel García Márquez's story also appeals to cynics who see the yearning.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

In The Cider House Rules you can find nearly everything great about John Irving's writing, and probably much that his detractors think not so great. It could be his most characteristic novel—a return, after what.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

When I first finished Ender's Game, before starting the second book in the series, I wondered what all the fuss was about. Oh, I enjoyed Ender's Game. It was a real scifi page-turner. But I did not feel good about.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

From those wonderful, shocking opening lines to the end, Ellen Foster is a completely absorbing novel, and the incredible thing is that Kaye Gibbons seems not to work at it. It all just flows straight from Ellen's strange young.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

So many people, whose opinions I otherwise value, have told me how incredibly impressed they were by The Bonfire of the Vanities that I wonder what I'm missing, as I have only a middling appreciation for.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

It may seem odd an acclaimed series of novels near the end of the twentieth century should feature characters from the period of the First World War. Or that issues from that war time should continue to resonate with.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

Blindness may be the most popular of José Saramago's novels, possibly because it is one of his easiest to get into. From the beginning the plot reads like a science fiction story—one of those tales in which a virus or.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

Let's see. Margaret Atwood writes her prize-winning novel The Blind Assassin about an elderly woman writing her memoirs about her sisters, one of whom has written a novel called The Blind Assassin, which recounts her trysts.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

Of all Philip Roth's novels, The Human Stain comes closest to being a masterwork comparable to classic literature. Compared to most of his other works, which offer discrete slices of American life, the 2000 novel.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

It's hard not to think "classic" as you're reading Atonement. Especially in the first half with its scenes of country estate life, reminiscent of Jane Austen or the Brontë novels, as experienced through the perspective of.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

Joseph Boyden's debut novel, Three Day Road, was a revelation for many when it was published to acclaim in 2005. It was a revelation in the first place, of course, for depicting in such exacting and grisly detail the story.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

Nordic noir had been around before the The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and its sequels made it a worldwide fad. For at least a decade earlier, Scandinavian crime writers, like Henning Mankell, had been winning.... Critique • Quotes • Buy